Personal Development Re-Imagined

Productivity

This is a follow up to my Morning Ritual – Start Your Day Productive. This post will conclude my morning ritual trial. In this post I will summarize my findings about implementing a morning ritual, the good, the bad and the ugly

I have already discussed many of the benefits of implementing a morning ritual in my day 2 post. So it certainly is a good habit that I’d recommend anyone try implementing. The bad news is that it takes a lot of trial and error, and discipline to implement.

Just like implementing any other healthy habits, there will be days where you totally blow it and wont feel like doing your morning ritual. I skipped my morning ritual on day 3. What stinks is that on day 4 it was even harder for me to get back on track.

All in all this was a great experiment. If you have anything to share about morning rituals please leave a comment

I find that when I first wake up, I have the tendency to get distracted. Whether I want to check my email, reply to some text messages on my phone or read the news. These are many of the way I used to start my day in the past.

However once I push myself to get going on my morning ritual, and especially start the physical activity portion of it, the rest takes care of itself.

I’m also finding that it’s a bit easier with some preparation the night before. If you are planning on taking a walk in the morning, it will help tremendously if you prepare the night before. Lay out your walking clothing and shoes. Maybe find your water bottle, and your music player. This way when you first wake up, everything you need to start your morning ritual is right there and you have no excuse to skip out on it or be distracted.

Some Benefits of the Morning Ritual:

Getting your physical activity or exercise out of the way first thing in the morning. This is probably the biggest benefit. It sets you up for a healthy active day, leaves you feeling energized and ready to take on whatever comes your way.

Starting the day in a Positive Mindset. Doing your physical activity and eating a healthy breakfast as part of your morning ritual gets you in a positive mindset. If later on in the day negativity or laziness tries to sneak in, you will most probably ignore it. That positive and healthy momentum that you build in the morning tends to stay with you all day.

Some Morning Ritual Issues to Watch our for:

Perfectionism. This will certainly make implementing a morning ritual very difficult. Things will come up. Maybe you are planning on doing a morning walk, you wake up and it’s raining heavily outside. If you are a bit of a perfectionist and get angry about this, you will probably just give up on your morning ritual. Instead be flexible, do your best, try an alternate psychical activity at home, or even skip the physical activity portion of your morning ritual for that day. Alternate physical activities could include cleaning your house, doing sit-ups, doing push-ups and so on.

Waking Up Earlier. You might have to wake up a little earlier than usual to do your morning ritual. Waking up earlier can be tough. An easy way to do it is to wake up earlier slowly and gradually. Maybe wake up 15 minutes earlier everyday this week. And then next week wake up 30 minutes earlier, and so on.

Your Morning Ritual is simply what you do every morning when you first wake up. For most of us this is rushing out of bed, and trying to get to work on time.

I’ve read in my many personal development sources about the importance of a morning ritual. This is a ritual that you come up with to start your day off. Most sources claim that a morning ritual boosts up your productivity tremendously throughout the day.

While you are free to include anything you want in your morning ritual, some common elements are:

Physical activity, some kind of exercise like walking, yoga or even going to the gym

A healthy breakfast (many health guru’s claim that this motivates you to eat healthy the rest of the day)

A shower or other grooming, cleanliness activities

I decided to give the morning ritual a serious try, and wanted to keep everyone updated on my progress. I will be trying it for 5 days and posting everyday about my results. Today was day 1, and here is my morning ritual:

Drink 0.5 Liter of Water (might add protein powder) – Many claim that this leaves your skin and body feeling healthy after the dehydration that happens during sleep.

Physical Activity for 30 Minutes. This could be a walk, a run, or some weight lifting.

Shower

Eat a Healthy Breakfast

Review my Goals & Visualizations & Plan Goals for the Day

In my experiment I will be checking if this really does increase my productivity, and if it’s worth the effort.

Since today was day 1, I did notice the following:

I woke up feeling a bit lazy, however after the physical activity portion of my morning ritual I was feeling great and ready to tack another day

I did get a lot more work done than usual

My head has been a bit clearer, and I have been feeling a bit more energetic

Also if you are interested in trying the morning ritual yourself for 5 days and reporting your results, please leave a comment below stating your interest. I will contact you at the email address you use when submitting the comment.

Your Morning Ritual is simply what you do every morning when you first wake up. For most of us this is rushing out of bed, and trying to get to work on time.

I’ve read in my many personal development sources about the importance of a morning ritual. This is a ritual that you come up with to start your day off. Most sources claim that a morning ritual boosts up your productivity tremendously throughout the day.

While you are free to include anything you want in your morning ritual, some common elements are:

Physical activity, some kind of exercise like walking, yoga or even going to the gym

A healthy breakfast (many health guru’s claim that this motivates you to eat healthy the rest of the day)

A shower or other grooming, cleanliness activities

I decided to give the morning ritual a serious try, and wanted to keep everyone updated on my progress. I will be trying it for 5 days and posting everyday about my results. Today was day 1, and here is my morning ritual:

Drink 0.5 Liter of Water (might add protein powder) – Many claim that this leaves your skin and body feeling healthy after the dehydration that happens during sleep.

Physical Activity for 30 Minutes. This could be a walk, a run, or some weight lifting.

Shower

Eat a Healthy Breakfast

Review my Goals & Visualizations & Plan Goals for the Day

In my experiment I will be checking if this really does increase my productivity, and if it’s worth the effort.

Since today was day 1, I did notice the following:

I woke up feeling a bit lazy, however after the physical activity portion of my morning ritual I was feeling great and ready to tack another day

I did get a lot more work done than usual

My head has been a bit clearer, and I have been feeling a bit more energetic

Also if you are interested in trying the morning ritual yourself for 5 days and reporting your results, please leave a comment below stating your interest. I will contact you at the email address you use when submitting the comment.

Feeling a bit drowsy lately? Maybe you have been feeling sluggish and tired throughout the day. Maybe you have been feeling sleepy during the afternoons at work. Maybe you just want to feel more energetic through the day. Well here are some Instant Energy Tips.

Take a Power Nap. Take a 5-10 minute power nap. Sit back in your seat, close your eyes, and just let yourself fall asleep for 5-10 minutes. You can do this on trains, buses, and even in cars as long as you aren’t driving. You can also do it during your lunch break at work.The key is that you fall asleep sitting up on a chair. If you fall asleep on a bed, you will be tempted to stay in bed, and it will feel like a huge hassle getting out. However since chairs aren’t very comfortable you usually wont fall asleep for long, and will naturally wake up in a few minutes feeling refreshed and energized. You can also try biphasic sleep if you would like to be more energetic throughout the day.

Eat Smaller More Frequent Meals.Eat a small meal every 2-3 hours. This helps keep your energy levels more even throughout the day. I’m sure you have the experience where you eat a huge lunch, and afterwords notice a huge decrease in your productivity. You probably felt sleepy and just wanted to go back to bed. Maybe you even were at work, and started dozing off staring at your computer screen, and kept making sure your coworkers didn’t notice

Modify Boring Activities.Often I noticed that certain activities tend to leave me feeling lazy, a bit tired, and even sleepy. Usually those activities are the boring ones, things that “I Have” to do rather than want to do. The solution I came up with was making those activities more exciting.If I was bored at work, then I’d take a break from working and read an interesting article, check out a cool online video, take a walk around the office and talk to co-workers, send a crazy text message or two to some friends etc. Whatever boring activity you have to do you can usually modify to be more exciting. The more exciting an activity is the more energetic your body will feel when you do it.

Use the Power of Full Focus.Often your body isn’t giving you the level of energy you need because you aren’t demanding it. To demand more energy and more productivity out of your body use the power of full focus. Whatever activity you are working on, give it 100% of your focus, skills, and cognitive ability.Often people fall asleep when reading because they aren’t reading fast enough. Did you know that the faster your read the more engaged your mind is? Your mind will increase your comprehension speed to adapt to your increased reading speed.Be fully present and focused on whatever you are doing. Often we are either thinking about past situation or future events in our lives all the time. This is very inefficient since we can’t control the past or the future. This also drains our cognitive abilities, focus and our energy.

Eliminate, Eliminate, and Eliminate Some More.Often we are out of energy because we are trying to do too much with our time. Instead of focusing on the few more rewarding activities in our day, we are very passive and let ineffective useless tasks waste our time. Use the power elimination and increase your productivity. This will help you make more time, and have more energy for the really important tasks in your day.

Why does everyone want to be more productive? Lack of time, everyone wants more free time. Well what uses up our free time in the first place?

Mostly useless, ineffective, boring, mundane, necessary tasks. This is why the biggest productivity tip is Elimination. And here is a list of things you can start eliminating from your life right away that will free up your time so you can do more productive things…

Eliminate Watching TV. It numbs out your emotions. Say what? When you watch too much tv, you start living your life through the characters in the shows and movies you are watching. You feel their emotions, you live through their actions, and you achieve their goals. In other words, you forget about your life, things you need to take care of and the goals that you need to accomplish. Start gradually watching less TV and watch your productivity increase.

Eliminate Worry. Worry is useless. Often we worry about things we can’t control in the first place. We worry about possible future events. We worry about what others think of us. We worry about what others are saying about us. Stop worrying, start doing, and watch your productivity increase.

Eliminate Perfectionism. We often want to be perfect. We want to look perfect. We want to dress perfect. We want to talk perfectly. And the list goes on. There is nothing wrong with self improvement. This is a self improvement site. However there is always good enough and then there is perfect. Good enough is often sufficient. Trying to be perfect is usually a waste of time. Here is an example. If you are thinking of buying a car, you could spend months researching everything about cars, their features, their ratings, their safety etc. You can then test drive different makes and models and finally buy the perfect car. What did you do? You wasted lots of your valuable time. Instead, why don’t you just buy a car that’s good enough? Decide the 3 most important factors in buying your future car, and research only those three factors. Save time, and do more productive things.

Eliminate Indecision. We often want to make the best decisions. I even remember this stupid little video we saw in school that went on for 2 hours about how decisions basically make up your future blah blah blah… While decision are important we often wast too much time making them. Being decisive is a trait of very successful people. Make decisions quickly and adjust them based on the results. This will help you create more free time to do the really productive things in life.

Eliminate Blame. Want to get no where in life? Play the blame game all the time. We all do it to some degree. It’s when we blame our current life situation on other people, on circumstances, on nature, or basically on anything else we can’t control. As a result we focus on things we can’t control, rather on our own actions, thoughts, and decisions which we can direct. Blame less, and take responsibility more. This will free up a lot of your wasted time and energy which you can put towards more productive things in your life.

I have started my biphasic sleep experimenton May 22, 2008. I plan on trying out biphasic sleep for 30 days.

Introducing Biphasic Sleep

Biphasic Sleep is sleeping twice in a 24-hour period. There are different variations of it. A very common biphasic sleep schedule is sleeping 4.5 hours at night and then taking another 1.5 hour nap sometime during the day. While biphasic sleep isn’t very common in America, it is practiced in many countries around the world.

My Biphasic Sleep Schedule

I will be taking two 3 hour naps each day. I will be going to sleep from 3 AM – 6 AM and from 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM. This schedule works great with my current day job and my other daily activities. I will be trying my best to follow the sleeping schedule. One of theadvantages of biphasic sleep is flexibility. Biphasic sleep is much more flexible than polyphasic sleep. Going to bed half an hour, or an hour late shouldn’t be a big deal. Occasionally skipping a nap is also fine. I will focus on waking up the same time everyday. If I’m late taking one of my naps, I will still wake up at the same time, and take the following nap a bit earlier. I will also make sure that the length of each nap is an increment of 90 minutes

Advantages of Biphasic Sleep

From reading about biphasic sleep I have discovered the following potential advantages. I will certainly report on the accurateness of these advantages throughout my experiment.

A More Stable Energy Level Throughout the Day. On a regular sleeping schedule you usually get tired towards the end of the day, and aren’t very productive. Biphasic sleep eliminates that since your sleeping twice a day. As a result you should experience a more stable energy level throughout the day.

More Free Time. Many who have tried biphasic sleeping have reported that they feel as much energy sleeping 6 hours per day (or less) as they did when they slept 7-8 hours a night. This creates a potential 7-14 hours of free time every week, or 30-60 hours of free time per month. What will I do with all the free time

Schedule Flexibility. With biphasic sleep, you get a lot of flexibility on the kinds of activities you can do during the day. For example I have a day job, however my biphasic sleep schedule will allow me to be out late on weeknights (since I don’t have to sleep until 3 AM) and still make it to work energized the next morning (waking up at 6 AM).

Disadvantages of Biphasic Sleep

The following are potential disadvantages of biphasic sleep reported by others. I will asses the accuracy of these disadvantages as I provide status updates on this site.

First 7-10 Days are tough on your body. Whenever you are switching your sleeping patters, you will usually be a bit tired and experience some fatigue the first 7-10 days. You also might have to juggle some things around in your schedule to accommodate the new sleeping times.

Social Life Impact. In order to maintain a somewhat steady sleep schedule, you might have to skip certain events, show up late, leave early etc. Biphasic sleep is flexible and allows for such small changes, however some who have tried it have reported a negative impact on their social life. This is one of those factors that might vary greatly from one person to the next depending on an individual’s responsibilities and commitments.

Variables I Will Monitor

I will be monitoring and reporting on the following variables during my 30 day experiment:

Physical Energy. Overall physical energy and abilities. It will be interesting to see how biphasic sleep impacts to my cardiovascular exercise or weightlifting workouts.

Emotional State. It will be interesting to see if the change in my sleeping habits will increase my anxiousness, or impact my temper or mood in general. Be on the watch out for some cranky posts in the next 30 days

Productivity. Will I be able to get more done with the extra 1-2 hours per day? or will the change in my sleeping habits get the best of me?

Hunger. How is biphasic sleep going to affect my appetite?

Water Intake. How is biphasic sleep going to affect my water intake level?

Eye Redness/Irritation. In the past when I don’t get my usual 7 hours of sleep I’ve often had some eye redness and irritation in the morning. If there was a night where I got only 4 hours of sleep, I had a hard time putting on my contact lenses the following morning. This is usually because of two reasons: contacts weren’t in their cleaning solution long enough to disinfect, and my eyes were red and a bit irritated because of the lack of sleep. This is why I got my eye glasses ready on hand. I’m also working on my smart cool nerdy look

Social Life Impact. I’m Curious to see how biphasic sleep will impact my social life. Will I have to skip certain events that occur during my sleeping times? Or will it be okay to skip a nap once in a while? How will my friends and family take it?

Possible Future Biphasic Sleep Plans

If I have success with the two 3 hour naps per day schedule, I might attempt a more extreme biphasic sleep schedule. A schedule where I’m taking a 3 hour nap at night and a 1.5 hour nap sometime during the day.

Managing a home based business is not that easy. Though it has got its own advantages there are several problems that come with it. You might have a lot of distraction from your environment or even from your family. It’s really a difficult task to manage your schedule while you are running your business from home.

For ensuring good productivity in your home based business you should learn to separate your home life and business work and manage accordingly. I have tried to provide some tips that might help you in your home based business:

You should schedule your time such that your important business works find the right amount of time rather than some petty works.

Set goals each and every day. By the end of the day ask yourself whether you have finished them all. If not, find out the reason for your lag. This type of daily goal setting gives you lot of confidence in your line of business. This also helps in proper usage of your precious time.

You might have children at home. But don’t get distracted by them or other members of your family. Don’t take the advantage of working from home. Let them understand you are still working. Allocate separate timings for your leisure activities. Most of the home businesses have gone unproductive because of their family distractions.

Invest some extra time into your business. During the initial stages of your business, make sure you are working for a longer time period than usual. This might help in giving a firm base to your business. In turn you will experience the productivity for sure.

Keep away from distractions like TV or fm radios. They are the prime enemy for your business work. You can turn them on when you are free, but not during your business hours. Set your table in a place devoid of these kinds of distractions.

Have you heard of many saying all work and no play makes one dull. That means a lot. Have fun when you are done with your job or during your break hours. You will become really fresh after having some fun. Start your work fresh.

You might try working offline to avoid distractions through internet. Deal with your mail accounts offline. If you are online, limit yourself for essential usage and nothing more.

Multitasking is a must for a good business man. You can try to concentrate on other works if you are waiting for a content to be printed or in between your phone calls. Ultimately you can get more work done in less time.

Consider yourself as your boss or head. Speak to your conscience about the daily goals. Reward yourself for a job well done.

Sometimes you may find it too difficult to carry the business single handed. During those circumstances don’t hesitate to get assistance from your family or friends.

Productivity is a requirement for success and success is a requirement for productivity. It might be obvious why you need to be productive to be successful. In today’s busy life you are constantly getting bombarded with new info. Most of the info is a waste of time. However there are little gems in between that will create lots of opportunity for you. For example, if you read 20 different posts about how to make money online, you’ll usually find that there is only one post that’s really good and that you can apply.

Being productive is a skill that one builds. As you become more productive you become better at judging info. You can quickly see whether a piece of information is useless (and therefore you can ignore it) or is useful (and therefore you can concentrate on it). Productivity is also important when it comes to your thinking. Often most of our thoughts are useless and most of our worries are a wast of time since they never come true.

Becoming mroe aware of your thoughts, your worries will help you get red of the useless ones. It will free up your mental energy so that you can focus and concentrate on the important things in life.

By now you are probably wondering how success is a requirement for productivity. Well if you are successful you are often rewarded for it, most commonly through money. You can then use this money to outsource mundane tasks and therefore increase your productivity.

It’s the reason why most wealthy business men have an assistant to take care of mundane tasks for them. However you can start being more productive without being successful. If success is your goal then you should start trying to be more productive and efficient starting today.